updated 12:00 am EST, Tue January 4, 2011

HP Pavilion, Elite, Slimline get Beats and Sandy

HP's Pavilion home desktops got a major lift early this morning with both sound and visual upgrades. The Slimline s5700, Pavilion p6700 and Elite HPE-500 now have the Beats audio that was previously only an option for notebooks. Making the pick gives them richer audio output from headphones or speakers, purportedly getting closer to the intended sound.

Systems with dedicated graphics, such as the Elite's use of a Radeon HD 6770 in some models, also bring multi-display technology to HP's mainstream desktops for the first time. HP uses AMD's Eyefinity to either expand the regular desktop area or, in a few cases, support multi-monitor 3D gaming.

Systems use either AMD or Intel processors depending on the configuration, starting out with as little as an AMD Athlon II X3 and moving up to Core i7 and Phenom II X6 chips. Depending on the trim, users can outfit as much as 8GB of RAM and a 2TB hard drive as well as expected extras like Blu-ray drives. All of the systems ship on January 9 and will start at prices of $300, $330 and $600 for the Pavilion, Slimline and Elite HPE respectively.